A Vicious Circle

Bill Banowsky is a Goth in kicker land.

His lipstick and nail polish are black, his hair is dyed S-15 Black Velvet and poofed up like a troll doll’s. His Satan’s Cheerleaders T-shirt is covered by a long-sleeved shirt he made out of fishnet hose. A bondage belt takes 10 minutes to put on each morning; it rides beneath a 13-pound black leather jacket laden with spikes.

Not exactly the wardrobe of choice at a boot-scootin’ Texas high school, where cowboys and jocks are the Big Men on Campus. A boy he’d never met from the school’s reigning country-western crowd registered his rejection of the Goth look by spewing chewing tobacco juice in Banowsky’s face. Banowsky admits that the harassment provoked him to “help the kicker down some stairs.”

That little clique struggle meant diploma by GED.

“It was typical for how it went,” says Banowsky, on the phone from his porch in San Antonio. “Within my group I get treated very well, because I behave respectably. But outside of my group, I’m not considered very popular because of the things I do. . . .

“For a while it was like I’d stick my clothes in a blender and see what it looks like. And going to school looking like you were just dug up from the ground--the kickers didn’t like that, but my friends thought, ‘Hey, cooool!’ ”

Now 19 and training to be a martial arts instructor, Banowsky managed to survive high school peer pressure with his chosen identity intact. But he understands how students like Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold might not.

“The tyranny of the little guy,” he called it. “They got stepped on because of what they liked.”

Same as it ever was?

Much remains untold about the private lives of the boys who gunned down 13 people and then themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., on April 20; little is known of what triggered the blood bath.

School psychologists, counselors and sociologists say they doubt a scenario in which the deranged spree was simply payback by computer nerds tormented by jocks. Still, when the rampage cracked open this modern-looking school in the Denver suburbs, old and familiar status strata were exposed within.

And in the numbing aftermath of the deadliest school slaughter in our history, fears have rushed in about teen cliques: Have they become more ominous, more threatening, more dangerous, more deadly? If a kid joins the wrong one, is there anything we can do?

“It’s really hard to tell if we’re looking at things getting worse or not,” says Dr. Beth Doll, associate professor of school psychology at the University of Colorado at Denver, where she has focused on the factors in a community that foster a child’s mental health. “I think we are quick to remember a real idyllic view of our childhood, and then to think things are much worse. But we really don’t have any evidence that’s true.

“I mean, I remember terribly difficult cliques when I was in high school,” says Doll, 48. “And think of ‘West Side Story’ [first staged in 1957]; it was a musical about gang violence in the schools.”

But the gangs in “West Side Story” fought mainly with bricks and knives. The prevalence of guns in the population today casts a darker shadow over parents and students weighing the pros and cons of particular friendships. Teen violence is actually down from several years ago, but gun seizures on campus have increased.

“Gun access? This is the $64,000 question,” says Bradford Brown, professor and chairman of the educational psychology department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Since 1982, Brown has researched adolescents and the importance of their peers. In a recent three-year study, he and others surveyed and interviewed about 16,000 high school students in Wisconsin and California, asking about their social circles.

“Littleton, and what is going on there? The most honest answer is: we don’t know,” he says. But his studies have revealed “a couple of changes that I think are noteworthy. The first is, as schools become multi-ethnic . . . adolescents [have become] a bit more sensitive about stereotypes. Our conscience has been raised about identity.”

The second thing, Brown says, is that “certain affiliation can be a life or death thing. Say gang affiliation. . . . It’s real dangerous to wear one’s group identity so openly. Walking down the street can be the end of your life.

“In the good old days, as we fondly remember them, gee, maybe there was a big brawl and somebody came home with a black eye or a broken arm. Nobody came home dead. That can happen these days.”

Austin Wade has seen the differences--and similarities--in cliques from school to school. Born in Belize, he moved to the States with his father, who eventually settled in a dangerous part of Los Angeles. Austin attended ninth grade at Jordan High in Long Beach but got into a fistfight and was booted. He transferred to University High School in Irvine, where he played football and graduated last year with A’s and Bs. Now 19, he dreams of making it as a rapper.

Even cookie-cutter Irvine had its “little share of violence,” Wade recalls. University High had its “own little race war. The Chinese against the blacks. There were fistfights, and people going to the hospital and to jail. It started at school and it went off campus after school to a park. . . . Some Asian guy called a black guy a [name]. And it went from there.”

Yet Wade, who is back in L.A. living with an aunt, says the social safety net of football prevented him from feeling like he’d been dropped onto Mars, an example of the positive aspects of peer pressure.

“Football, being in sports, it took me away from trouble. You know the football players tend to be the popular guys, so people got to know me.”

A Key Stage in Growing Up

Cliques, in general, are largely viewed by educators and child development researchers as a positive part of maturing, a necessary ingredient of the age-old process of picking and choosing identities and friends.

Evolving fashion and music may give cliques a new look and aura, but they’re still basically what they’ve always been: efforts to fulfill the universal adolescent need to belong.

A clique is “where you fall in love and share your secrets and get positive support, especially about family problems,” says USC sociology professor Barry Glassner, author of a new book called “Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things” (Basic Books).

Larry Sullivan, assistant executive director of the National Assn. of School Psychologists, says, “As long as we have adolescence, we will have these groups.”

But do today’s cliques fill a greater vacuum than they used to, a vacuum left by more broken homes, parents working more, families settled in new communities without roots?

Irvine, perhaps America’s most famous planned community, was incorporated in 1971. University High is its oldest high school, a tree-shaded campus on 50 well-kept acres near an affluent neighborhood that is home to many faculty at nearby UC Irvine. The students at University High (and their parents) have big educational ambitions.

Austin Wade’s race war notwithstanding, University High has a reputation not for drive-by shootings but for academic slam-dunks: 94% of last year’s graduates enrolled in post-secondary institutions, 60% of those being four-year colleges.

With a student body that is only half Caucasian (and 40% Asian), University High is not a replica of Columbine, where the population is predominately white.

Still, Irvine is ripe for stereotypes. And a quick scan of Del Taco, University High’s prime off-campus lunch spot, reveals the usual suspects: jocks, nerds, brainos, bandos, crammed into orange booths, wolfing down burritos for a frantic half-hour.

They nod their brace-faces “yes,” cliques absolutely exist, but none of the kids admits to being in a snobby one.

“Ours is kind of the cool-nice-everybody-is-interracial group,” says Sharda Barner, 15, slurping on an orange soda. She is in a pink sleeveless shell, hip-hugger jeans, with aqua nails, her fair skin dashed with freckles. Sharda is matter-of-fact in her rundown of social rungs at the high school:

First, there are the “airheads, who are all blond cute girls . . . who stand with a foot out and their arms crossed and wear Roxy pants and want to be cheerleaders or supermodels.” Then there are the Rollerbladers and rival skaters, who form cliques of their own. There are also the mostly black rappers; the foreign-born students; the Goths in black clothes and whiteface, whose parents think “they listen to hard rock and dress all gross and have sex, so they feel misunderstood, but they are really nice.” Then there’s “the 666 group, the devil group.”

What?!!

“Oh, yeah, they do witchcraft, but there are some good witches. They’re all anti-Christian and stuff. . . . I try to keep an open mind and like everyone,” Sharda says, revealing a greater tolerance for Satanists than for snobs. “To a certain extent in high school, you have to care what people think of you. . . . We all want to be cool,” she adds with a giggle.

Hafez Adel, 14, sits finishing lunch with Henry Liu, 15, and Brian Lee, 15.

“Henry’s in my geometry class, and this semester Brian was in our P.E. class,” says Hafez, whose family moved from Iran after hearing about Irvine’s fine schools. He says the campus social order is without much friction--and sometimes without much mixing. “Everybody at school, every group, has their territory. They sit in the same place every time; so do we.”

Stasis? Or stability? Kids and researchers alike say that high school is the place where friendships become as important as family relationships--often more so, when the clique can serve to shelter and support adolescents having trouble at home. Social ties can become a life raft for children whose parents are divorced or often away from home because of work. And in newer suburbs, adolescents may not have the safety net of extended family that older communities tend to provide.

“I had a friend who lost both parents, one in a car crash,” says John Atabek, 16, a University High junior who plays football and maintains a 4.0 GPA. The friend moved in with an uncle but “didn’t like spending too much time at home. He would try to spend most of his time with his friends.”

Atabek also tells of a sophomore girl whose evenings “basically consisted of microwaving some soup and going and hanging out with friends because her parents worked so much. They were just gone.”

A University High graduate who arrived from South Korea when he was 13 says he’d socialized almost exclusively with Korean American friends. But when his parents divorced, he found solace with a white kid.

“Our parents separated, we both have a stepmother, so we have that in common,” he said.

But it’s not always easy to move beyond a circle of friends, especially an ethnic circle.

“I was always called a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside,” recalls Charlie Ha, a 21-year-old University High alum whose family emigrated from South Korea when he was 9 months old. “Banana, Twinkie. . . .”

A young Mexican American nearby offers up “coconuts,” a putdown aimed at Latinos seen as similarly “whitewashed.”

Crossing the Lines Isn’t Always Easy

On a Friday after classes are over, a clutch of kids mingles near the gymnasium. They believe they are able to move with ease among various social circles, though that’s not to say that any student can gain entry to any crowd.

Indeed, plenty of students say they feel the sting of being iced out of the most coveted social circles.

“You have to size up the food chain,” one girl says candidly. “Like I like this guy, but he’s in the popular guys crowd, and his friends are expecting him to go out with some bodacious blond, flawless-face girl with big boobs. We get along really good in first period, but I don’t know.”

A boy of about 15 says he spends his days avoiding eye contact with bigger guys on campus who barb at him for not being a jock.

“I just never look at them direct,” the boy says bitterly. “It’s easier that way. But it’s bull----.”

Which is how the Littleton shooters are said to have felt about the bigger men on campus.

“We’ve seen dramatically how one’s crowd affiliation among peers might figure particularly in some of these events,” observes professor Brown of the University of Wisconsin. “Certainly, it hasn’t been ruled out that [Harris and Kiebold] were just crazy. We’re still researching, and I think the events at Littleton encourage us to keep looking.

“I suspect we’ll learn more as time goes by, and how peer groups and peer relationships played into those particular events. . . . The subject does strike a chord.”

Nancy Wride can be reached by e-mail at nancy.wride@latimes.com.